Re: A letter to Microsoft

What on earth is Visual Fred...?

I'm curious if it's some strange pun on Visual Studio. Google thinks it refers to VB.Net. For either of those, I have no idea why it's supposed to have driven "serious developers" away from Microsoft. (I do remember lots of people complaining. How many serious developers stopped writing VB and wrote, um, what's non-Microsoft... Delphi or Objective C instead?)

I do agree we need a decent graphics API. Codegear could step in here. If Delphi / BC++ was the language of choice for developers writing apps with any care for graphics, it would be great...

- dave.


"Dan Barclay" <Dan@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4851ed88$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You need to quit holding back and tell us what you really think. Reading between the lines, I agree with part of your message.

What I disagree with is on your assessment "Borland"' (Codegear's) response to the situation. While they sipped the koolaid, to their credit they paid attention to what developers were actually doing and "refocused" on native development.

My hope is that they'll continue development of native options, and also keep some options open for us to deploy our source libraries in .Net and (hopefully) other ways.

Unlike MS, who have abandoned everyone who wishes to do native development and (in particular) dumped a lot of serious developers with the release of vFred, Codegear has at least paid attention to the real world.

With regard to Vista <sigh>. Nevermind.

Be aware that those who are responsible for the vFred debacle think they did well. There's a subtle clue in there.

Dan



"sysrpl" <sysrpl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4851d994$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
With all the negative opinions floating around lately about Vista and WPF (on the channel 9 forums), I (being a Delphi user) have been quite pissed about the current "state of affairs" of the Windows programming community. I still believe native code and Delphi are where it's at, but both Borland and Microsoft seem to be doing everything in their power to kill the community.

Microsoft killed their most loyal developers with the release of Visual Fred and then took a seven year hiatus before dumping the Vista turd on everyone's doorstep.

Borland on the other hand has slowly allowed itself to crumble, continually losing their best talent to other companies, while stupidly mistreating the best the developer community had to offer (Hello Peter Morris and Ray Lischner if you're reading this).

We've all had plenty of time to ponder the problems, and this thread isn't going to solve anything, but I just wanted to given one last push to revitalize my (hopefully our) interest in programming for Windows.

That said, here is my feature request to Microsoft ...

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Microsoft,

GDI+ is a complete failure. It is slow, uses software rendering (please don't mention Matrox, they aren't an option in 2008), and doesn't have an officially supported C interface.

Video here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2ceiKZyGEHE

Microsoft, as per the video above, please get serious and create a new hardware abstraction API for drawing graphics to replace the ancient GDI. Put it into the Platform SDK as a C interface and create some .NET wrappers for it. Use every means at your disposal to make damn sure hardware vendors provide accelerated drivers for it.

I know what you're going to say ... we've done that twice already (GDI+ and WPF) with the last two shipments of Windows, so the answer is NO!

Well sadly, in my opinion again, WPF is not the answer. Microsoft you missed the mark twice now. While .NET might be well suited for enterprise development, it is not a real choice for commercial software. Commercial applications (all of the many programs I depend on everyday such as Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Lightwave, Firefox, Textpad, and I could go on and on) are and will remain in the C/C++ realm. This goes doubly so for intensive graphics applications.

So unto WPF. WPF needlessly ties graphics programming to a tree model, where everything to be drawn is an object and added must be added to some kind of drawing surface collection. It's unintuitive, and step in the wrong direction.

I want a programming model which has been proven over time and has worked work well in the past. I expect a C style graphics API in the vein of ...

Surface.Line(Pen, 10.5, 23.25);

Rather than ...

Line.Stroke = Pen;
Line.StrokeThickness = 2;
Line.X1 = 0;
Line.Y1 = 0;
Line.X2 = 10.5;
Line.X2 = 23.25;
Surface.Add(Line);

What we need is more advanced hardware blitting with blend modes, direct access to graphics memory, fast and smooth hardware interpolation of image, stroke, and fill resizing with antiailising done in hardware. We want layered graphics output, hardware transforms, and polygon clipping with spline curves as polygon segments while preserving strokes and fills.

We don't need a high level markup interface to putting pixels on the screen. Leave the markup in a control, not in the API.

Microsoft, please give us a new solid graphics API and make sure hardware manufacturers support it this time.



.

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